by Sarah Lotz
I made myself a cup of coffee, sat in the kitchen and stared out of the window. It was a lovely spring day, and I remember thinking how nice it would be to just go out for a walk, sit in a cafe somewhere. Have some time to myself.
Reuben was awake by then, and it was Reuben, and not Al, who was there that day. I thought, I could just pop out for ten minutes, sit in the park in the sun. Breathe.
I made Bobby his breakfast, cleaned the kitchen, and asked Reuben if he’d mind if I slipped out for a few minutes.
‘You go, Rita,’ he said. ‘Go and have a nice time.’
I made Bobby promise that he wouldn’t leave the apartment, and then I left. I walked down to the park, sat on the bench opposite the sports centre, and raised my face to the sun. I kept telling myself, just five minutes more, and then I’ll get back and change the sheets on the bed, take Bobby to the store with me to buy milk. A group of young men pushing baby buggies strolled past me, and we exchanged smiles. I glanced at my watch, realised I’d been sitting there for over forty minutes–where had the time gone? I was less than five minutes from my building, but accidents can happen in seconds. The sudden rush of panic made me feel nauseous, and I hurried home.
And I was right to be worried. I screamed out loud when I ran into the apartment and saw the two of them standing there in my kitchen in their identical suits. One of them had his eyes closed and was holding Bobby’s hand to his chest. The other one had his hand raised above his head, and was muttering something under his breath.
‘Get away from him!’ I yelled at the top of my voice. I could see right away what they were. The fanaticism radiated out of them. ‘Get the hell out of my apartment!’
‘Is that you, Rita?’ Reuben called from the other room.
‘The men asked to come in and watch The View with us, Bubbe,’ Bobby said. ‘Are they the ones Betsy calls bupkes?’
‘Go to your room, Bobby,’ I said.
I turned on the two men again, fury sparking through every vein. They looked like twins, their blond hair identically parted to the side, that same smug, self-righteous expression on their faces, which made the situation all the more disturbing. Bobby told me later they’d only been there for five minutes before I got home and that they hadn’t done anything other than what I’d seen in the kitchen. They must have watched me leaving and decided to take a chance. ‘All we ask is that you let Bobby’s spirit wash over us,’ one of them said. ‘You owe it to us, Mrs Small.’
‘She owes you nothing,’ Betsy said from behind me–thank God she’d heard me yell. ‘I’ve called the cops, so you get your Bible-thumping tushes out of here.’
The two men glanced at each other and made for the door. They looked like they were thinking about spouting more of their nonsense, but the look on Betsy’s face shut them up.
Betsy said she’d take care of Bobby while I made a statement. I knew it was too late to worry about her finding out about Reuben. The police commissioner himself came to see me later that day. He said I should consider round-the-clock protection, maybe hire private security, but I didn’t want a stranger in my home.
When I’d finished with the police, I could see immediately that Betsy knew and wanted to talk about Reuben’s transformation. What choice did I have then but to come clean? And who did I have to blame but myself?
Lillian Small’s neighbour, Betsy Katz, agreed to speak to me in late June.
What pains me most of all was that I’d been careful around those reporters. Those newspaper people, they could be smart. So clever with their sneaking around. Calling me up and asking leading questions as if I was born yesterday and wouldn’t see right through what they were doing. ‘Mrs Katz,’ they’d say, ‘isn’t it true that Bobby is acting a little strange?’ ‘You can keep your acting strange,’ I’d tell them. ‘Does it hurt to be so stupid?’
If it wasn’t for Bobby, I don’t know if Lily would have found the strength to go on after Lori died. Lori was a nice girl, arty sure, but she was a good daughter. Me, I don’t know if I would have been able to go on after a stab in the heart like that. And that Bobby! What a lovely child! It was never a burden taking him off Lily’s hands. He’d come into my kitchen and help me make cookies, used to let himself in as if he was one of the family. Sometimes we’d sit down and watch Jeopardy together. He was good company, a good boy, always happy, always with a smile on his face. I worried that he wasn’t spending enough time with other children–what kid wants to spend all his free time with old ladies?–but it didn’t seem to worry him. I’d told Lily many times that Rabbi Toba’s family ran a good yeshiva in Bedford-Stuyvesant, but she wouldn’t hear of it. But could I blame her for wanting to keep him so close? I was never blessed with children, but when my husband Ben fell to cancer ten years ago this September, I felt the loss like a knife in my heart. Lily had lost too much already. First Reuben, then her daughter.
I knew that Lily was trying to hide something from me, but not in my whole life could I have guessed what it was. Lily wasn’t a good liar, she was an open book. I didn’t nag her to tell me. I figured that eventually she would come to me and tell me herself.
I was cleaning my kitchen when I heard Lily shouting that day. My first thought was that something must have happened to Reuben. I ran straight to her apartment. When I saw those two strange men in their suits, and their fanatical eyes, I called the cops right away. I knew what they were. Me? I could spot one of those fanatics a mile off after they started crawling around the neighbourhood. Even when they thought they were being so clever by dressing up like business people. They were smart, ran out of there before the cops arrived. While Lily made a statement, I went into the apartment to watch Bobby and Reuben.
‘Hello, Betsy,’ Bobby said. ‘Po Po and I are watching From Here to Eternity. It’s an old movie where everyone is coloured black and white.’
And then Reuben said, clear as day. ‘The oldies are the goodies.’
And how do you think I reacted? I almost jumped out of my skin. ‘What you say, Reuben?’
‘I said, they don’t make films like they used to. Are you having trouble with your hearing, Betsy?’
I had to sit down. I’d been helping Lily care for Reuben since Bobby came out of hospital, and I hadn’t heard him speak a word that made any sense in all that time.
Lily came back in and she saw right off that I knew. We went into the kitchen and she poured us both a brandy. She explained it all to me. How he’d started talking out of nowhere one evening.
‘It’s a miracle,’ I said.
When I got back to my place, I couldn’t settle down to anything. I had to talk to someone. I tried calling Rabbi Toba, but he wasn’t in and I needed to get it off my chest. So I called my sister-in-law. Her best friend’s nephew Eliott, a good boy–or so I thought then–was a doctor and she told me I should talk to him. I was just trying to help. I thought maybe I could get a second opinion for Lily.
Saying it now, it sounds like I was a real fool, I know this.
I don’t know if they paid him, or what they did, but I know it was him who talked to those reporters. The next day, when I left the house to go to the store–just to buy myself some bread as I was having soup that evening–I saw all the reporters hanging around the apartment, but that wasn’t new. They tried to talk to me but I gave them the brush-off.
I saw the headline on a placard outside the bakery: ‘It’s a miracle! Bobby’s Senile Grandfather Starts to Speak.’ I almost threw up right there. May God forgive me, but it did cross my mind that I could blame it on those religious putzes who had conned their way into the apartment. But the article made it clear that the news had come from a ‘source close to Lillian Small’.
I was so worried. I knew what this could mean for Lily. All those crazies, led by that real dangerous one, I knew they would jump on this like flies on a turd.
I ran back home and I said to Lily, ‘I never meant to let it out.’
She turned white, and could I blame her? ‘Not again,’
she said. ‘Why won’t they leave us alone?’
Lily never forgave me. She didn’t cut me out of her life, but there was a watchfulness when she was around me after that.
I wonder, I really do, if this wasn’t part of what caused everything else afterwards. May God forgive me.
PART EIGHT
CONSPIRACY
APRIL–JUNE
The following article appeared on makimashup.com on 19 April 2012–a website dedicated to reporting ‘the weird and the wonderful from around the world’.
Japan’s Queen of Weird
The first video clip shows a beautiful Japanese woman kneeling on a tatami mat in the centre of an elegant, dimly lit room. She adjusts her bright red kimono, blinks and then starts reciting from Stolen, a Japanese best-selling memoir written by Aki Kimura, who was sexually assaulted by three US marines on Okinawa Island in the 1990s. In the second clip, she spends twenty minutes talking in explicit detail about an alien abduction. In the third, she lectures on why Sun Air crash survivor Hiro Yanagida is a national treasure, a symbol of Japan’s endurance and identity.
These clips, which first appeared on the Japanese video-sharing platform Nico Nico Douga, have gone viral, attracting more hits than any clip in the history of the site. What makes them so compelling has little to do with the eclectic subject matter of the woman’s monologues, and everything to do with the woman herself. You see, the woman isn’t human. She’s a surrabot–the android doppelgänger of Aikao Uri, a former pop idol who hit it big in the 1990s before retiring to marry politician Masamara Uri. Aikao is no slouch when it comes to notoriety. Rarely out of the news, she started a fashion craze for shaved eyebrows in the early 2000s, is fervently anti-American (this is rumoured to stem from her failure to make it in Hollywood in the mid-nineties), always wears traditional Japanese dress as a rejection of western fashion ideals and most controversially of all, recently shared her belief that she has been abducted by aliens several times since her childhood.
Watching Aikao Uri’s surrabot talk is disconcerting. It takes several seconds before your brain adjusts and you realise there’s something just… wrong about the otherwise eloquent woman. Her cadence is unemotional, her mannerisms just a split second too slow to be convincing. And her eyes are dead.
Aikao freely admits that she commissioned her own surrabot after the news broke that Sun Air crash survivor Hiro Yanagida will only communicate via the android doppelgänger made by his father, a renowned robotics expert. Aikao believes that speaking through surrabots, which are controlled remotely, using state-of-the-art camera and voice-capturing equipment, ‘will bring us closer to a pure way of being’.
And Aikao isn’t the only one who has embraced this ‘pure way of being’. Known worldwide for their ‘out there’ fashion sense, young Japanese trend-setters are also jumping on the surrabot bandwagon. Those who can’t afford their own surrabot (the cheapest android doppelgängers can cost up to 45,000 US dollars) have taken to purchasing realistic mannequins and sex dolls and modifying them. The streets around Harajuku–where cosplayers traditionally congregate to show off their style–is buzzing with fashionistas, both male and female, eager to flaunt their own versions of the surrabot craze, which has been dubbed ‘The Cult of Hiro’.
There’s even talk that girl bands, such as the wildly successful AKB 48 ensemble and the Sunny Juniors, are creating their own all dancing, all lip-synching surrabot line.
In mid-April I flew out to Cape Town, South Africa to meet with Vincent Xhati, a private investigator who was on a full-time retainer to discover the whereabouts of the elusive Kenneth Oduah–the so-called ‘fourth horseman’.
The Arrivals area at the Cape Town International Airport is teeming with wannabe tour guides, all shouting, ‘Taxi, lady?’ and waving fliers for ‘all-inclusive Khayelitsha tours’ in my face. Despite the chaos, it’s easy to spot Vincent Xhati, the private investigator who’s agreed to escort me around Cape Town for a couple of days. At six foot four and weighing in at three hundred pounds, he towers over the taxi drivers and tour operators. He greets me with a wide grin, and immediately takes charge of my luggage. We make small talk as we push through the throng towards the parking lot. A couple of jaded male cops in blue uniforms saunter around, eyeing everyone with suspicion, but neither they, nor the signs warning new arrivals not to ‘go off with strangers’, appear to be deterring the tour hawkers. Vincent bats a couple of the more tenacious away with a snapped ‘Voetsek.’
Exhausted after the sixteen-hour flight, I’m dying for a coffee and a shower, but when Vincent asks me if I’d like to go straight to the Dalu Air crash site before checking into my hotel, I say yes. He nods in approval and ushers me towards his car, a slick black BMW with tinted windows. ‘No one will mess with us in this,’ he says. ‘We will look like a politician.’ He pauses, glances at me, and then roars with laughter.
I sink into the passenger seat, noting that there’s a copy of the grainy photograph of Kenneth Oduah–taken when he was four years old–mounted on the dashboard.
As we leave the airport behind and glide onto a slip road, I spot Table Mountain in the far distance, cloud dribbling over its edge. It’s heading into winter, but the sky is a perfect, eggshell blue. Vincent sweeps onto the highway, and I’m immediately struck by the obvious signs of poverty around us. The airport facilities may have been state-of-the-art, but the road is flanked by sagging shacks and Vincent is forced to brake sharply as a small child dragging a dog on a rope lead zigzags through the traffic.
‘It is not far,’ Vincent says, clicking his tongue as he’s forced to undertake a rusty mini-bus packed full of commuters that’s hogging the fast lane.
I ask him who has hired him to search for Kenneth and he smiles and shakes his head. The journalist who gave me Vincent’s details assured me that Vincent could be trusted, but I can’t help feeling a stab of unease. I ask him about the reports of the Kenneth hunters who have been mugged.
He sighs. ‘The press have exaggerated this. Only the ones who behaved in a stupid manner have had trouble.’
I ask him if he believes Kenneth is actually out there somewhere.
‘It doesn’t matter what I believe. Maybe the child is here somewhere, maybe he isn’t. If he can be found, I will find him.’
We pull off the highway, and on our right I make out the edges of a vast area crammed with small brick houses, tin and wood shacks, and row after row of outhouses that look like sentry boxes.
‘Is that Khayelitsha?’
‘Ja.’
‘How long have you been looking for him?’
‘Since the beginning. It has not been an easy ride. There was some trouble at first from the Muslim community who tried to stop people talking to those of us who were searching for him.’
‘Why?’
‘You did not have that in America? Ah. The troublemakers assumed that Kenneth was a Muslim boy, and they objected to the Americans coming here and claiming that he was one of their messengers. Then it was made public that he is from a Christian family, and now they don’t care!’ Another roar of laughter.
‘I take it you are not religious?’
He sobers up. ‘No. I have seen too much.’
He turns right, and within minutes we’re in the heart of the township. The dirt roads that weave through the endless rows of shacks are unmarked. There’s a proliferation of Coke signs, most attached to old shipping containers that I realise are makeshift shops. A group of small children dressed in dirty shorts wave and grin at the car, then whoop and chase after it. Vincent pulls to the side of the road, hands one of the children ten rand and instructs him to watch the BMW. The kid puffs out his chest and nods.
A few hundred metres from us, a tour bus is parked alongside a row of hawkers selling their wares. I watch as an American couple pick up a wirework sculpture of a plane and start haggling with a vendor.
‘We’ll walk from here,’ Vincent says. ‘Stay close to me and don’t make eye contact with any of the loc
als.’
‘Okay.’
Another laugh. ‘Don’t worry, you’re fine here.’
‘Do you live here?’
‘No. I live in Gugs. Gugulethu.’
I’ve seen the aerial footage of the place where the plane went down, tearing a jagged passage through the landscape, but the people here are clearly tenacious, and already there is little sign of the devastation. Construction is starting on a new church and shacks have already grown up all over the sites where the fires raged. A gleaming black glass pyramid, engraved with the names of those who lost their lives (including that of Kenneth Oduah), sits incongruously in the centre.
Vincent sinks to his haunches and runs his fingers through the soil. ‘They still find bits. Bones and pieces of metal. They worm their way up out of the earth. You know like when you have a wound? A splinter? The earth is rejecting them.’
The mood is subdued as we retrace our steps and head back onto the highway. More mini-buses whiz past, packed full of people heading into the city. Table Mountain races towards us, the cloud now obscuring its trademark flat top.
‘I will take you to your hotel and then we will go hunting tonight, okay?’
Cape Town’s Waterfront area, where my glass and steel-skeletoned hotel sits, couldn’t be more of a contrast to where I’ve just been. It’s almost like being in a different country. Hard to believe that the designer stores and five-star restaurants are just a short taxi ride away from the poverty of the township.
I shower, then head down to the bar and make some calls while I wait for Vincent. There are several middle-aged men hanging around in small groups, and I do my best to eavesdrop. Many are American.